Red River Radio Amateurs

A friend of mine asked recently if perhaps our angst over ARRL was misguided. There is a segment of hams that will hate the ARRL for any reason, often stupid, irrelevant reasons. I still encounter people who are angry about incentive licensing or claim the ARRL is against CW despite running daily CW bulletins. Naturally we should be angry over nefarious activities like canning directors for questionable conflict of interest claims or running shadow boards, but perhaps the decline of ARRL and its membership numbers is just due to the overall decline in the number of people interested in participating in organizations, and out of their control. We see it everywhere, from churches, to fraternal community organizations, to ham clubs with many withering away due to lack of interest.

2025 ARRL Field Day will be here before you know it! We’re just 7 weeks away from ham radio’s biggest event, held each year on the 4th full weekend of June (28 – 29 for 2025). The theme of “Radio Connects” highlights the many ways amateur radio makes connections.

When I first got my Technician license in 2019, I heard people call amateur radio “the hobby of experimentation”. I was told I had received a “license to learn”. Indeed, 47 CFR Part 97, the section of the Code of Federal Regulations that governs amateur radio in the United States says this in Subpart A under Basis And Purpose:

This article has been in the draft queue for some time and it seems appropriate to complete it as a companion to the previous article.

On the eve of Hamvention 2025, the largest (?) Amateur Radio conference in the world, I think it’s an opportune moment to recognize that Amateur Radio, like all other organized activities, needs to constantly renew itself with new entrants. My perception from my research for Zero Retries is that this trend — more technical entrants, is not widely recognized, or perhaps is only just now beginning to be recognized. And, perhaps more importantly, what these new Amateur Radio Operators are expecting from, and contributing to Amateur Radio.

In this RATPAC Amateur Radio video Travis Johnson, KE5FXC, an Emergency Communications Coordinator with the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—speaking in an unofficial capacity as KE5SXC—addresses communications plans for large-scale events and presents the framework that he personally uses for communications planning and discusses some of the ideas behind it.